The City as an Environment for Urban Experiences and the Learning of Cultural Practices

2016 ◽  
pp. 275-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Páramo
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The City

scholarly journals The Spaces of Nostalgia(s) and the Politics of Belonging in Contemporary Chernivtsi, Western Ukraine

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 218-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Koziura
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Second World War ◽  
City Center ◽  
Symbolic Resources ◽  
The Social ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and ‘ethnic unmixing’, guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger. This article explores ways in which Habsburg nostalgia has become an important factor in contemporary place-making strategies in the city of Chernivtsi, Western Ukraine. Through the analysis of diasporic homecomings, city center revitalization, and nationalist rhetoric surrounding the politics of monuments, I explore hybrid and diverse ways in which Habsburg nostalgia operates in a given setting. Rather than a static and homogenous form of place attachment, in Chernivtsi different cultural practices associated with Habsburg nostalgia coexist with each other and depending on the political context as well as the social position of the “nostalgic agents” manifest themselves differently. Drawing from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that in order to fully understand individuals’ attachment to space, it is necessary to grasp both the subtle emotional ways in which the city is experienced by individuals as well as problematize the role of the built environment in the visualization of collective memory and emotions of particular groups. The focus on changing manifestations of the Habsburg nostalgia can bring then a better understanding of the range and scope of the city’s symbolic resources that might be mobilized for various purposes.

Bricks in the Making of Race and Place: Excavating a Lieu de Souvenir in New Orleans

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-32
Author(s):  
Angel Adams Parham
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
The City ◽  
Race And Place

This essay facilitates a multi-dimensional immersion into the life and rhythms of New Orleans, an entrée to the past that equips us to better understand the present and, from there, critically and creatively to envision our possible futures together. We explore the Faubourg Tremé by traversing layers of its lieux de souvenir - places of remembering, a concept inspired by but distinct from Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire - across three time periods. Each lieu de souvenir we visit from 1720 to the present will highlight material and symbolic foundations in Tremé that help us to understand key aspects of New Orleans’s past and present. The object that will guide our travel and meditation through each layer is the lowly but highly serviceable brick. At a purely material level, bricks are the literal building blocks of the city. Roads were paved with them and homes and other buildings were constructed with bricks as well. And at a symbolic level, bricks carry multiple rich and complex significations: Who makes them? How does their manufacturing shape the lives of the laborers who create them? Who buys them, and who profits from their sale? Tracing the brick and its uses throughout each lieu de souvenir sheds light on key social relationships, inequalities, and cultural practices that form the foundation of New Orleans’s past and present.

“Africa begins in …”: Donato Ndongo Bidyogo’s and Francisco Zamora Loboch’s Transatlantic Cartographies

2019 ◽  
pp. 338-347
Author(s):  
Silvia Bermúdez
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Equatorial Guinea ◽  
Fortress Europe ◽  
The City ◽  
Point Of Departure

This essay takes as point of departure the well-known expression “Africa begins in the Pyrenees,” to evaluate the ways in which two postcolonial authors from Equatorial Guinea, Francisco Zamora Loboch (1948) and Donato Ndongo Bidyogo (1950) express the double consciousness that molds the writing of those living in exile in Spain, displaced by brutal dictatorships. Particular attention is paid to the transatlantic cartographies delineated by Donato Ndongo’s El metro (2007) [The subway], as it dramatizes the negotiation of Africanness in the city of Madrid, an emblem of present-day Fortress Europe. In Francisco Zamora’s case, the essay Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca (1994) [How to be Black and not die in Aravaca] and his 2009 novel Conspiración en el Green (el informe Abayak [Conspiracy in the green (The Abayak report)] demarcate the transatlantic cartographies questioning Spanish social and cultural practices that legitimize violence against Blacks.

What does Ainu cultural revitalisation mean to Ainu and Wajin youth in the 21st century? Case study of Urespa as a place to learn Ainu culture in the city of Sapporo, Japan

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-179
Author(s):  
Kanako Uzawa
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Non Profit ◽  
Social Initiative ◽  
The City

This article illustrates living experiences of Ainu cultural practices by the students of Urespa. Urespa is a self-motivated, non-profit social initiative or association founded in 2010 by Professor Honda Yuko at Sapporo University with the aim of bringing Ainu and Wajin students together in a curriculum-based environment to co-learn the Ainu language and Ainu cultural practices. In the Ainu language, urespa means “growing together”. The article draws on the author’s fieldwork with Urespa in Sapporo, Hokkaido, in 2016 in focusing on a new way of practising Ainu culture in an urban setting in the 21st century. The article, therefore, focuses on Ainu cultural revitalisation, everyday cultural practices, and on how it plays out within Urespa in a context of decolonisation and self-determination in Japan.

scholarly journals Cultural Practices and Environment along the Bishnumati River in Kathmandu

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 53-60
Author(s):  
Shobha Shrestha
Keyword(s):  
Human Activities ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Household Survey ◽  
Environmental Conservation ◽  
Public Agencies ◽  
River Stretch ◽  
Environmentally Sensitive ◽  
The City

The Bishnumati River is one of the major sources of water in Kathmandu city for domestic and agricultural uses. But the quality of the river environment has been degraded seriously since the last few years. This paper is an attempt to explore environmental condition along the Bishnumati River with specific focus on human activities, perception and institutional efforts in dealing with the river environment. Based on field observation, household survey, and key informant survey in eight segments along the river stretch from the city periphery to down town, the information acquired indicate that human activities related to environmentally sensitive phenomena were very much dominant in degrading the river environment. The local inhabitants were aware of the river environmental conservation. The local public agencies were however not seriousness in implementing the waste management activities, but instead they practiced environmentally sensitive activities at the riverbanks. Efforts at both local community and public agencies levels are most warranted to protect the Bishnumati river environment from further degradation. The Geographical Journal of Nepal, Vol. 7, 2009: 53-60

scholarly journals On Allotopia: The Spatial Accumulation of Difference in Bixiga (São Paulo, Brazil)

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 387-404
Author(s):  
Jeroen Stevens ◽  
Bruno De Meulder
Keyword(s):  
Urban Area ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Urban Analysis ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
The City

This article will unfold a longe durée spatial biography of the urban area of Bixiga (São Paulo, Brazil) to probe the particular role of space in the conflation of different cultural practices and territorial claims. The extended case study bridges indigenous, colonial, and postcolonial urbanization as they amalgamated an intricate assemblage of material and cultural strata. Combined historical urban analysis and fieldwork allow to uncover how the resulting urban milieu integrates discrepant urban worlds, perpetually iterating between centrality and marginality, innovation and degradation, oppression and resistance. Building on Foucault’s (1984) conception of heterotopia, Bixiga will surface as an allotopia, a place that accommodates, cumulates, and celebrates a multitude of differences. It sheds light, this way, on more insurgent histories of urbanism, where urban space is piecemeal forged through contentious struggles over space in the city.

scholarly journals The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad

2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 625-651
Author(s):  
Rijul Kochhar
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Antibacterial Properties ◽  
Bactericidal Action ◽  
Potential Response ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
River Waters ◽  
Bacterial Viruses ◽  
The Ganges ◽  
The City

The confluence ( sangam ) of India's two major rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, is located in the city of Allahabad. Ritualistic dips in these river waters are revered for their believed curative power against infections, and salvation from the karmic cycles of birth and rebirth. The sacred and geographic propensities of the rivers have mythic valences in Hinduism and other religious traditions. Yet the connection of these river waters with curativeness also has a base in historical microbiology: near here, the British bacteriologist Ernest Hanbury Hankin, in 1896, first described the ‘bactericidal action of the waters of the Jamuna and Ganges rivers on Cholera microbes’, predating the discovery of bacterial viruses (now known as bacteriophages) by at least two decades. Pursuing the record of these purificatory waters in sacred writings and folklore, and later elaboration in the work of Hankin, this paper traces an epistemology of time that connects the mythic to the post-Hankin modern scientific, asking how imaginations of the waters’ antibacterial properties are articulated through idioms of faith, filth and the phage. The paper explores how the bacteriophage virus comes to be spoken about within secular and sacred epistemes of infection and riverine pollution, among contemporary historians, biologists and doctors, and in the city's museums. At the same time, it traces the phage in histories arcing from the ancient religious literature, to colonial disease control efforts, to today, where bacteriophages are being conceived as a potential response to the crisis of planetary antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Allahabad presents a ‘cosmotechnics’ where faith, filth and phage are inextricably intertwined, generating complex triangulations between natural ecologies, cultural practices and scientific imaginations. Cosmotechnics therefore opens up novel avenues to reimagine the phage as a protean object, one that occupies partial and multiple spaces in the historico-mytho-scientific arena of Allahabad today.

Disputing Limeño Historical and Cultural Heritage

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 301-305
Author(s):  
Gisela Cánepa-Koch
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The State ◽  
Grassroots Organizations ◽  
Urban Workers ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
The City

In the 1970s many persons of andean origin migrated to Lima. Informally and through the mediation of emerging grassroots organizations, the nuevos limeños negotiated with the state for their right to residency in the city and to sanitation and other services. They struggled for recognition as citizens. Gradually an informal economy mainly based on Andean cultural practices of production gave way to entrepreneurship, which created a new middle class. In this way Andean migrants to Lima became urban workers and consumers and appropriated and transformed the city.

Leisure in hospitals and its interface with health: A study about the reality of a Brazilian city

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Gabriela Baranowski Pinto ◽  
Christianne Gomes
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Direct Observations ◽  
Semistructured Interviews ◽  
Iterative Analysis ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
Belo Horizonte ◽  
The City

The purpose of this research is to understand the role of leisure in shaping the reality of hospitalized patients in Brazil. The methodology combines both bibliography and field research techniques performed in internment units of three hospitals in the city of Belo Horizonte. The field research consisted of direct observations and semistructured interviews with 30 volunteers, among hospitalized subjects, companions, and health professionals. The data were analyzed qualitatively through iterative analysis. Results show that leisure activities can improve the health status of hospitalized subjects. Its role in the hospital is mainly related to compensatory and utilitarian functions, with contributions to rest, pain, and suffering reduction, expansion of friendship network, creativity, ability of doing critics, of educating sensitivity, through the dissemination of content and cultural practices among the subjects.

Body Performance and the Engagement within the City: Women Artists Reframing Gender Roles in Amman

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-202
Author(s):  
Marta Bellingreri
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Cultural Management ◽  
Creative Agency ◽  
The Status ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Female Presence ◽  
The City

Abstract This article focuses on women artists in the capital of Jordan, Amman, and particularly on their cultural practices as an expression of creative agency. Analyzing the work of visual artist and performer Samah Hijawi and of the co-founders of the art program Spring Sessions, Toleen Touq and Noura al-Khawsaneh, allows us to see the engagement in the city as the reframing of gender roles in neoliberal contemporary patriarchal societies. Their resistance to the codified norms affecting the female presence in public and in the field of cultural management is expressed and experimented with in the visual arts, within the contemporary cultural scene of Amman, the geography of the city and the political commitment, often in informal domains rather than in institutionalized contexts. Women’s creative agency in Amman challenges the status of the State’s monitorial and surveillance system within their city and their country. Artistic itineraries, performances, collective practices, urban cartographies, personal stories, individual or shared initiatives and artworks are portrayed in this article as one of the different modalities of creative agency that re-signifies feminisms today in the Middle East.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document